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Previous research suggested that the microbes weren’t “eating” excess carbon because it was in a form they couldn’t metabolize. It’s unclear exactly why excess organic carbon remains, Estes says, but her study has ruled out at least one existing explanation. But in the deep sediments, the balance between the two is oddly lopsided. Oxygen acts as a sort of “fuel” for metabolism and other biochemical reactions inside the organisms carbon provides raw materials for those reactions, and lets the cells rebuild their own structures and organelles. Usually, the types of microbes that thrive there would use both chemicals. The presence of carbon is unusual, she adds, because the sediments contain oxygen as well. At the time of the study, Estes was a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, working directly with co-author Colleen Hansel.
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“From a pure chemistry perspective, they should be able to metabolize all of that carbon, but they’re not,” says Emily Estes, lead author on the paper, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Delaware.
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But for some reason, the microbes nearby aren’t taking full advantage of this windfall. Any bacteria that stumbled across it would be treated to a tiny feast. There’s not a lot of it out there in deep mid-ocean sediments of the Atlantic and Pacific, making them tough places for microorganisms to survive. Under normal circumstances, carbon like this would be snatched up quickly by microbes. By analyzing the core’s sediments using high intensity X-rays, the researchers found that they contained low levels of organic carbon molecules-bits of ancient proteins from long-dead organisms-preserved in sediment up to 25 million years old. In a paper published in the January 21 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, WHOI scientists examined long core samples taken aboard the R/V Knorr and R/V Revelle in the middle of the north Atlantic and south Pacific oceans. The study helps further our understanding of the limitations of life on Earth and could help inform how life might exist on other planets. A new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is beginning to pick apart how they survive by examining their source of “food”-nearby molecules of organic carbon. Although they’re technically alive, they grow in slow motion, and can take decades for a single cell to divide-something their cousins at the surface do in a matter of minutes. Far below the ocean floor, sediments are teeming with bizarre zombie-like microbes.